Low-rank-modified Galerkin methods for the Lyapunov equation

Of all the possible projection methods for solving large-scale Lyapunov matrix equations, Galerkin approaches remain much more popular than Petrov-Galerkin ones. This is mainly due to the different nature of the projected problems stemming from these two families of methods. While a Galerkin approach leads to the solution of a low-dimensional matrix equation per iteration, a matrix least-squares problem needs to be solved per iteration in a Petrov-Galerkin setting. The significant computational cost of these least-squares problems has steered researchers towards Galerkin methods in spite of the appealing minimization properties of Petrov-Galerkin schemes. In this paper we introduce a framework that allows for modifying the Galerkin approach by low-rank, additive corrections to the projected matrix equation problem with the two-fold goal of attaining monotonic convergence rates similar to those of Petrov-Galerkin schemes while maintaining essentially the same computational cost of the original Galerkin method. We analyze the well-posedness of our framework and determine possible scenarios where we expect the residual norm attained by two low-rank-modified variants to behave similarly to the one computed by a Petrov-Galerkin technique. A panel of diverse numerical examples shows the behavior and potential of our new approach.